Net Zero is communism: The war on coal is a war on capitalism, not climate change.

Flat White I 9 December 2024 I Spectator Australia

‘F-ck Germany … and f-ck Israel!’ giggled climate mascot Greta Thunberg from behind a lectern draped in a keffiyeh while wearing another one around her neck.

In a November tweet, Ms Thunberg said she had been travelling through northern Kurdistan, listening to ‘countless stories of the current systematic oppression and repression’ and the ‘destruction and exploitation of the nature’.

She added, ‘The government continues to use terrorism as a pretext to silence its political opponents.’

The merging of the Climate Change ‘let’s fix carbon with communism’ movement with Free Palestine is idiotic but predictable. Both ideas are fronts for socialism. Both tug on humanitarian heartstrings to justify the destruction of society to make way for a dictatorship of bastards.

When environmental activists express a desire to ‘f-ck the West’ we should listen to them and consider if their politics on climate might have an ulterior purpose.

Extinction Rebellion asks if we need to overturn capitalism to decarbonise. It is stated with no effort to explain why socialist, Marxist, and communist nations are the worst environmental caretakers in the world – nonetheless, they convince our children and educators to carry signs with System Change! through the streets of the West.

A Real Extinction Rebellion Means the End of Colonialism, Imperialism, and Capitalism, goes one climate justice headline in 2019. Capitalism and the climate crisis: Why it’s socialism or extinction, says another.

The latter is an article worth reading (Also provided below), if only to open your eyes about the underlying purpose of feel-good climate talk. It serves as a swift and brutal lesson on why the Liberal Party (and the Teals) are fools to play into the narrative.

‘He [Martin Empson] argues that disastrous climate change is an inevitable product of the inner working of capitalism as an economic system … fossil fuels are central to capitalism.’

The article goes on to say: ‘The book also traces why fossil fuels became so embedded in the system, looking at the way the steam engine powered by coal helped drive forward the Industrial Revolution, and how the use of coal and oil by European colonial powers allowed them to control the world through steamships and later more advanced battleships and aircraft.’

Just try not to do anything foolish, such as ask the authors which political system is building the most coal-fired power stations today, or laying the biggest oil pipelines, or fueling the largest armies…

The war on coal is a war on capitalism, not climate change.

Even though without fossil fuels, communism and Islamic theocracies would collapse overnight…

In this case, reality does not matter, nor does logic or merit. What matters is the ideology being used to brainwash younger citizens, convincing them to tear down their society without having any understanding of what sits in wait to occupy their Parliaments.

We should listen to writers such as Empson when they say, ‘These schemes [carbon markets and emissions trading schemes] are attractive to the capitalists because they appear to offer a way of dealing with climate change while allowing capitalist production to continue as normal.’

In practice, these schemes shield green communism from the eyes of the public, allowing it to fester and spread far beyond the limits of reason, infecting every branch of private and public life before its true nature is discovered. Conservative parties, especially the Liberal Party, helped devise the green economy to keep their private sector allies in business, but at what cost to the future of our political system? Liberal Prime Ministers have been feeding the wolf pups to stop them biting. Now they are fully-grown predators. A wolf does not see any difference between a steak and the outstretched hand.

The climate change movement continues to call for massive state intervention to build a so-called sustainable society. A green revolution which is actually a red revolution. They argue for the overthrowing of capitalist systems, comparing them to the awful and bloodthirsty revolutions of the past. Is that something we really want to see happen on Australian soil?

A Peter Dutton government carries with it a Net Zero target negotiated to walk the line between angry conservative farmers and inner-city Teal voters whose money the party would quite like to see back in the fold. If not the money, then certainly the prestige of the seats themselves.

At the time of announcing a ‘backslide’ on the Paris Agreement, Mr Dutton said: ‘I am not going to sign up to an arrangement that destroys our economy and sends families and small businesses into bankruptcy.’

Fair enough, but it is only partly true. Most of the renewable and Net Zero pathway will remain under a Dutton government with only minor tinkering. Still, what he should have said was, ‘We recognise that Net Zero is an ideological lie designed to damage capitalism and overthrow the government. From now on, all money dedicated to the enemies of democracy will be ceased.’ It could have been his Milei moment. Unfortunately, any declarations against Net Zero involve admitting ignorance or complicity. What the Liberals do not realise is that an apology would do just fine.

Instead, the Liberal Party home page says: ‘Our energy plan will deliver a balanced energy mix, with more renewables, more gas, and – in seven locations – replace retired coal plants with zero-emissions nuclear energy.’

In other words, they have no knowledge of the political games being played around them. This makes the Liberal Party the biggest useful idiots in the room instead of assuming their historical role as our salvation.

Politicians need to wake up, quickly, to what is really going on here and strip from their policy portfolio any mention of climate change and Net Zero and treat these ideas with the same distaste as Menzies gave to communism.

It has become fashionable to palm the culture wars off as irrelevant when anyone who has made a study of history knows that the culture wars are what shaped the most dangerous periods in human history and their scars live on in the geopolitical landscape where our leaders step through the corpses of lost empires on their way to UN climate talks.

Our conservative politicians will not entertain these discussions, let alone reason them out to their predictable end.

Let us return to the climate warrior Ms Thunberg and her campaign to promote the Palestinian cause to Western youth, feeding them tales of liberation as a chaser to climate politics.

The Marxist Left Review carried an article in June stating, ‘The new Nakba taking place in Gaza has made it clearer than ever that the struggle for Palestine is a struggle against the entire system of capitalism and imperialism in the Middle East.’

It goes on to add, ‘…the first task of socialists across the world is to offer our solidarity to the Palestinians and their liberation struggle … to do this socialists in Australia and across the world have thrown ourselves into organising protests, sit-ins, pickets, blockades, camps, strikes, and forums to grow and deepen the movement … there’s an urgent need to convince activists of the fundamental connection between capitalism and Palestinian oppression.’

Convincing the most privileged children in human history that the solution to their present state of comfort is a Palestinian-esque liberation featuring socialism might seem like an impossible task but universities act like crucibles, distorting reality while insulating young adults from the truth. Their experience is learned in the lecture hall rather than lived. What does their world look like post-liberation? Seriously. What magic realm do they envision for their fellow man?

The Middle East is, as many have pointed out, dominated by Stalinism and awash with tribal socialist dictatorships that promise freedom while establishing extreme Islamic religious theocracies that employ powerful arms of military violence, foreign assistance, and enjoy international bureaucratic protection from disastrous organisations such as the United Nations. These regimes sustain themselves almost solely on international aid, war mongering, and the sale of fossil fuels. They abhor every value treasured by Western university socialists and yet the young cheer beside those who would kill and enslave them if given half a chance.

Australian taxpayers may wonder what, if any, punishment the Labor Party should face having approved funding for UNRWA long after its involvement in Hamas became common knowledge. Facilitating the funding of foreign terror organisations would be an offence if perpetrated by a citizen, but what happens to a government guilty of the same crime? Nothing, as far as we can tell. What about our funding of third-world climate programs which further the goal of the global socialist revolution? How much of our money is spent building the scaffold beneath us?

The greater punishment will be exacted on all of us if we fail to call politicians out – whether they are pandering to communist climate goals or the hashtag campaign banners of foreign socialist uprisings.

If we continue to empower, through the ballot box, these policies in Western democracies our democracy will cease to exist.

This is supposed to be the Age of Science and Truth – so let us have a little truth in this election. Climate Change is communism and it must be deposed.

Author: Flat White

What to read next

Capitalism and the climate crisis — Why it’s socialism or extinction

Solidarity I 21 August 2022 I

A new book explains why it will take a revolution to force the action needed to halt the climate crisis—and how we can win one, explains Maeve Larkins

The last few years have seen a growing climate movement worldwide in the face of world leaders’ refusal to take the action needed to avert catastrophe.

From the school student Climate Strikes to Extinction Rebellion and Blockade Australia as well as the demonstrations around last year’s COP26 summit, new groups have sprung up to demand climate action.

Many have raised the slogan “system change, not climate change”. This acknowledges how massive fossil fuel corporations have forced governments to protect their interests. But what kind of system change do we need, and how do we get it?

Some, including prominent writers like Naomi Klein, see the problem as neoliberal policies which rely on the free market to fix the problem, rather than capitalism itself.

Their solution is often to support left-wing leaders like Bernie Sanders in the US to implement some sort of Green New Deal.

But efforts in parliament always end in disappointment.

The Greens here claimed their ability to block legislation in parliament would force Labor to the left. But The Greens were unable to push Labor to make any significant improvements to their pitiful 43 per cent emissions reduction target. The focus on parliament also carries the danger of demobilising the climate movement to focus on elections, instead of looking to movements from below to deliver change.

Martin Empson’s new book Socialism or Extinction: Revolution in a Time of Ecological Crisis is an accessible explanation of why only a socialist revolution—where workers seize control of their workplaces and run the economy democratically—can stop capitalism from destroying the world in its endless drive for profits.

It guides readers through many of the common debates in the climate movement.

Empson takes care to build his argument from the ground up. For this reason, it is a worthwhile read for anyone involved in climate activism.

He argues that disastrous climate change is an inevitable product of the inner working of capitalism as an economic system. He writes, “All capitalist production requires the use of natural resources through the exploitation of human labour. Because competitive accumulation is central to capitalist production, there is no limit on the system’s degradation of nature.”

Fossil fuels are central to capitalism, he argues, with fossil fuel corporations including energy companies and car manufacturers making up the bulk of the world’s largest companies.

Their total wealth, he writes, “is staggering” so that “BP, for instance, had a net income in 2021 of $8.5 billion and total assets of over $287 billion.”

The book also traces why fossil fuels became so embedded in the system, looking at the way the steam engine powered by coal helped drive forward the industrial revolution, and how the use of coal and oil by European colonial powers allowed them to control the world through steamships and later more advanced battleships and aircraft.

He dismisses any hopes of a green capitalism, looking at how market-based solutions such as carbon credits or offset schemes, which have made no dent in reducing emissions, can potentially encourage more fossil fuel investments.

These scams have been at the heart of all the carbon markets and emissions trading schemes that were supposedly designed to reduce emissions.

As Empson writes, “These schemes are attractive to the capitalists because they appear to offer a way of dealing with climate change while allowing capitalist production to continue as normal.”

What kind of movement?

In the face of the lack of real action, a number of more radical groups in the climate movement have concluded that conventional campaign tactics have failed.

Roger Hallam, one of the founders of Extinction Rebellion, argues that non-violent direct action is the only way to win change, while author Andreas Malm advocates violent tactics such as blowing up oil pipelines.

Empson contrasts these approaches with the success of mass mobilisations which combine large-scale street marches with disruptive mass direct action.

For instance, the Standing Rock campaign which stopped the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline was, “led by Indigenous people and supported by environmental activists, workers and even military veteran groups.” There were 15,000 people involved in the protest camp at its height.

But to win permanent change, we will need mass movements on an even larger scale.

Empson discusses the various proposals for a Green New Deal and massive state intervention to build a sustainable society.

If all the world’s resources were put to use to immediately transition to renewable energy, we could cut pollution extremely quickly. We could ensure sustainable practices in all of our industries, we could make energy free and available to everyone. We could set to work on repairing the damage already done, and ensure no one is left behind.

But the challenge of such proposals to reform capitalism “is getting them implemented”, he writes.

Activists who advocate getting more progressive politicians into power or change within the existing system under-estimate the forces we are up against.

As Empson explains, the power of the state alongside the interests of the rich means that, even when left-wing parties get a foothold in parliament, they are unable to implement the wide-reaching reforms that tackling climate change requires.

Capitalists, unable to escape the system’s logic of competition and profits, will not allow this to occur due to its threat to the profits of the massive fossil fuel companies.

The ultra-rich own the bulk of the mainstream media and use this to promote their agenda. But they also have enormous power thanks to their control over the major corporations and society’s basic economic decisions.

In the past they have used this to force elected governments to do their bidding through threatening to sack thousands of workers and crash whole national economies.

In a worst-case scenario, the ruling class can use the state not just to use violence against protests and social movements but to resort to the military to overthrow governments and parliamentary democracy itself.

Revolution

Empson therefore argues that in order to stop climate change, it is not enough to get progressive politicians into power but that the capitalist system as a whole has to be overthrown.

Empson draws on the history of past revolutions, such as the Paris Commune of 1871, the Russian Revolution of 1917 and more recent events like the Egyptian revolution in 2011 and the revolution in Sudan still ongoing from 2019 to explain how this has occurred.

He explains why the working class is central to any hope of revolutionary social change.

Capitalism is a system which protects the property rights of the bosses. The vast majority of people, who own nothing, must work for these bosses in order to live.

This unequal situation means that bosses can exploit workers by only paying them a fraction of what they earn for the bosses through their work.

While this means that the world is run in the interests of a tiny minority of ultra-rich bosses at the expense of the vast majority, it also reveals capitalism’s Achilles’ heel.

Through taking strike action and collectively refusing to work, workers have the power to bring capitalism grinding to halt. Strike action on a large enough scale shows ordinary working class people their own capacity to control society and run it for themselves.

Workers’ control of individual workplaces would be the basis for democratic control over the whole economy. This means that instead of a capitalist economy characterised by competition, exploitation, and the endless accumulation of profits, workers could run the economy along socialist lines.

There would mass democratic control of every aspect of society to ensure that everyone’s basic needs are met, and production run on the basis of planning, active participation, and debate.

This sort of socialist economy would be run by the vast majority in their own interests, and allow decisions about social and economic priorities to take full account of environmental sustainability.

It would allow a rapid and planned phase out of fossil fuels in favour of renewable energy and a zero carbon economy. Only then will climate change be addressed adequately and efficiently.

What we need is a socialist revolution. The question becomes: how do we get it?

Empson writes, “A protest movement can become a mass uprising, an uprising can develop into a revolutionary situation and a revolutionary situation can evolve into a workers’ power.

“But none of these steps are inevitable… Whether they do or not depends on the specific situation and the conscious intervention of women and men arguing for the movements to take those steps.”

This shows the need for a revolutionary socialist organisation which is capable of leading the movement to victory.

As he writes, “Revolutionaries cannot conjure revolution from thin air, but they can act to develop the combativity and organization of workers.”

In the here and now, socialists must aim to the broaden the climate movement, to develop the struggle, and to provide concrete answers to the challenges of the day. Martin Empson’s book is a thorough guide to equipping ourselves with these answers.

Socialism or Extinction: Revolution in a Time of Ecological Crisis, by Martin Empson, Bookmarks

Author: Solidarity

"Solidarity is a socialist group with branches across Australia.

We are opposed to the madness of capitalism, which has failed to prioritise human health and is plunging us into global recession at the same time as wrecking the planet’s future. We are taking the first steps towards building an organisation that can help lead the fight for an alternative system based on mass democratic planning, run in the interests of human need not profit.

We are an activist organisation committed to building a fighting union movement and to building social movements for climate action and refugee rights. We urge you to join us."

Frightening.